Entrepreneurship and Economic Development

Entrepreneurship and Economic Development is a major research area of CFR's Civil Society, Markets, and Democracy initiative. The business environment necessary for entrepreneurship to flourish is closely related to the political environment needed for stable democracy. Problems such as capricious state authority, corruption, and poor education hinder both private enterprise and democratic governance. Entrepreneurship itself can also serve as a potent antidote to excessive state authority. However, the correlation between economic and political freedom is far from exact. The Civil Society, Markets, and Democracy initiative aims to understand how best to promote entrepreneurship and its connection to broader economic growth and democracy. One priority is women’s roles as entrepreneurs and contributions to economic development, especially in post-conflict settings.

The G8 meeting at Camp David will focus on food security and advancing political transitions in the Middle East and North Africa, while the debate over solutions to the eurozone crisis will largely shift to the G20 forum, says CFR's Terra Lawson-Remer.

Economic growth stimulated by small and medium-sized enterprises can foster stability in fragile states. Comprehensive approaches that offer entrepreneurs access to finance, markets, networks, and skills should be offered.

Speaker: Hernando de SotoPresider: Isobel ColemanApril 23, 2012, New York

Speaker

Hernando de Soto, President of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy, which advises heads of state and governments worldwide; Author, The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World and The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else

Presider

Isobel Coleman, Senior Fellow and Director of the Civil Society, Markets, and Democracy Initiative, Council on Foreign Relations

Shari Berenbach, director of the Microenterprise Development Office at USAID, details how the agency promotes entrepreneurship in conflict and developing regions by empowering and encouraging women to manage their own small- and medium-sized businesses.

This meeting was part of the Roundtable Series on Entrepreneurs and Market Linkages.

In his new book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, Daron Acemoglu looks at why some nations prosper and why some fail. He concludes that it depends on whether institutions are pluralistic and inclusive or extractive and autocratic.

Addressing Egypt's economically debilitating subsidy system will be hard amid political transition, but with the country's social contract under review, the time is ripe for reform needed to put the country on a more viable economic path, says CFR's Isobel Coleman.